This is the Blog for William O. Beeman, Professor and Chair of Anthropology and specialist in Middle East Studies at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul Minnesota, formerly of Brown University. It includes current publications on Middle Eastern affairs, especially Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf region; anthropology; linguistics; performance; opera; things Japanese and Central Asian. Email: wbeeman@umn.edu

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Former Insiders Criticise Iran Policy as U.S. HegemonyGareth PorterWASHINGTON,
25 Feb (IPS) - "Going to Tehran" arguably represents the most important
work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy
toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a
systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as
well as very extensive documentation.

More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage
that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national
security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen
not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy
as a problem of U.S. hegemony.

Their national security state credentials are impeccable. They both
served at different times as senior coordinators dealing with Iran on
the National Security Council Staff, and Hillary Mann Leverett was one
of the few U.S. officials who have been authorised to negotiate with
Iranian officials.

Both wrote memoranda in 2003 urging the George W. Bush
administration to take the Iranian “roadmap” proposal for bilateral
negotiations seriously but found policymakers either uninterested or
powerless to influence the decision. Hillary Mann Leverett even has a
connection with the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), having interned with that lobby group as a youth.

After leaving the U.S. government in disagreement with U.S. policy
toward Iran, the Leveretts did not follow the normal pattern of settling
into the jobs where they would support the broad outlines of the U.S.
role in world politics in return for comfortable incomes and continued
access to power.

Instead, they have chosen to take a firm stand in opposition to U.S.
policy toward Iran, criticising the policy of the Barack Obama
administration as far more aggressive than is generally recognised. They
went even farther, however, contesting the consensus view in Washington
among policy wonks, news media and Iran human rights activists that
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election in June 2009 was fraudulent.

The Leveretts’ uncompromising posture toward the policymaking system
and those outside the government who support U.S. policy has made them
extremely unpopular in Washington foreign policy elite circles. After
talking to some of their antagonists, The New Republic even passed on
the rumor that the Leveretts had become shills for oil companies and
others who wanted to do business with Iran.

The problem for the establishment, however, is that they turned out
to be immune to the blandishments that normally keep former officials
either safely supportive or quiet on national security issues that call
for heated debate.

In "Going to Tehran", the Leveretts elaborate on the contrarian
analysis they have been making on their blog (formerly “The Race for
Iran” and now “Going to Tehran”) They take to task those supporting U.S.
systematic pressures on Iran for substituting wishful thinking that
most Iranians long for secular democracy, and offer a hard analysis of
the history of the Iranian revolution.

In an analysis of the roots of the legitimacy of the Islamic regime,
they point to evidence that the single most important factor that swept
the Khomeini movement into power in 1979 was “the Shah’s indifference
to the religious sensibilities of Iranians". That point, which conflicts
with just about everything that has appeared in the mass media on Iran
for decades, certainly has far-reaching analytical significance.

The Leveretts’ 56-page review of the evidence regarding the
legitimacy of the 2009 election emphasises polls done by U.S.-based
Terror Free Tomorrow and World Public Opinon and Canadian-based Globe
Scan and 10 surveys by the University of Tehran. All of the polls were
consistent with one another and with official election data on both a
wide margin of victory by Ahmadinejad and turnout rates.

The Leveretts also point out that the leading opposition candidate,
Hossein Mir Mousavi, did not produce “a single one of his 40,676
observers to claim that the count at his or her station had been
incorrect, and none came forward independently".

"Going to Tehran" has chapters analysing Iran’s “Grand Strategy” and
on the role of negotiating with the United States that debunk much of
which passes for expert opinion in Washington's think tank world. They
view Iran’s nuclear programme as aimed at achieving the same status as
Japan, Canada and other “threshold nuclear states” which have the
capability to become nuclear powers but forego that option.

The Leveretts also point out that it is a status that is not
forbidden by the nuclear non-proliferation treaty – much to the chagrin
of the United States and its anti-Iran allies.

In a later
chapter, they allude briefly to what is surely the best-kept secret
about the Iranian nuclear programme and Iranian foreign policy: the
Iranian leadership’s calculation that the enrichment programme is the
only incentive the United States has to reach a strategic accommodation
with Tehran. That one fact helps to explain most of the twists and turns
in Iran’s nuclear programme and its nuclear diplomacy over the past
decade.

One of the propaganda themes most popular inside the Washington
beltway is that the Islamic regime in Iran cannot negotiate seriously
with the United States because the survival of the regime depends on
hostility toward the United States.

The Leveretts debunk that notion by detailing a series of episodes
beginning with President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s effort to improve
relations in 1991 and again in 1995 and Iran’s offer to cooperate
against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and, more generally after 9/11, about
which Hillary Mann Leverett had personal experience.

Finally, they provide the most detailed analysis available on the
2003 Iranian proposal for a “roadmap” for negotiations with the United
States, which the Bush administration gave the back of its hand.

The
central message of "Going to Tehran" is that the United States has been
unwilling to let go of the demand for Iran’s subordination to dominant
U.S. power in the region. The Leveretts identify the decisive turning
point in the U.S. “quest for dominance in the Middle East” as the
collapse of the Soviet Union, which they say “liberated the United
States from balance of power constraints”.

They cite the recollection of senior advisers to Secretary of State
James Baker that the George H. W. Bush administration considered
engagement with Iran as part of a post-Gulf War strategy but decided in
the aftermath of the Soviet adversary’s disappearance that “it didn’t
need to”.

Subsequent U.S. policy in the region, including what former national
security adviser Bent Scowcroft called “the nutty idea” of “dual
containment” of Iraq and Iran, they argue, has flowed from the new
incentive for Washington to maintain and enhance its dominance in the
Middle East.

The authors offer a succinct analysis of the Clinton
administration’s regional and Iran policies as precursors to Bush’s Iraq
War and Iran regime change policy. Their account suggests that the role
of Republican neoconservatives in those policies should not be
exaggerated, and that more fundamental political-institutional interests
were already pushing the U.S. national security state in that direction
before 2001.

They analyse the Bush administration’s flirtation with regime change
and the Obama administration’s less-than-half-hearted diplomatic
engagement with Iran as both motivated by a refusal to budge from a
stance of maintaining the status quo of U.S.-Israeli hegemony.

Consistent with but going beyond the Leveretts’ analysis is the Bush
conviction that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq had shaken the
Iranians, and that there was no need to make the slightest concession
to the regime. The Obama administration has apparently fallen into the
same conceptual trap, believing that the United States and its allies
have Iran by the throat because of its “crippling sanctions”.

Thanks to the Leveretts, opponents of U.S. policies of domination
and intervention in the Middle East have a new and rich source of
analysis to argue against those policies more effectively.

*Gareth
Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S.
national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for
journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in
Afghanistan.(END/2013)